IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology – serie

This volume contains the proceedings of the IFIPTM 2008, the Joint iTrust and PST Conferences on Privacy, Trust Management and Security, held in Trondheim, Norway from June 18 to June 20, 2008. IFIPTM 2008 provides a truly global platform for the reporting of research, development, policy and practice in the interdependent areas of Privacy, Security, and Trust. Following the traditions inherited from the highly successful iTrust and PST conference series, IFIPTM 2008 focuses on trust, privacy and security from multidisciplinary perspectives. The conference is an arena for discussion about re levant problems from both research and practice in the areas of academia, busi ness, and government. IFIPTM 2008 is an open IFIP conference, which only accepts contributed pa pers, so all papers in these proceedings have passed strict peer review. The pro gram of the conference features both theoretical research papers and reports of real world case studies. IFIPTM 2008 received 62 submissions. The program commit tee selected 22 papers for presentation and inclusion in the proceedings. In addi tion, the program and the proceedings include 3 demo descriptions. The highlights of IFIPTM 2008 include invited talks and tutorials by industri al and academic experts in the fields of trust management, privacy and security, including Jon Bing and Michael Steiner.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP Conference on Wireless Sensors and Actor Networks held in Ottawa, Canada, July, 2008.This series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication. The scope of the series includes: foundations of computer science; software theory and practice; education; computer applications in technology; communication systems; systems modeling and optimization; information systems; computers and society; computer systems technology; security and protection in information processing systems; artificial intelligence; and human-computer interaction. Proceedings and post-proceedings of refereed international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Seventh Mediterranean Ad Hoc Networking Workshop (Med-Hoc-Net'2008), celebrated in Palma de Mallorca (llles Balears, Spain) during June 25-27, 2008. This IFIP TC6 Workshop was organized by the Universitat de les Illes Balears in cooperation with the Asociaci6n de Tdcnicos de lnform~tica and sponsored by the following Working Groups: WG6.3 (Performance of Computer Networks) and WG6.8 (Mobile and Wireless Communications). The rapid evolution of the networking industry introduces new exciting challenges that need to be explored by the research community. Aside the adoption of Internet as the global network infrastructure these last years have shown the growing of a set of new network architectures without a rigid and known a priori architecture using wireless techniques, like sensor and ad-hoc networks. These new types of networks are opening the possibility to create a large number of new applications ranging from domestic to nature surveying. These new networks are generating new technical challenges like the capability of auto-reconfiguration in order to give the network an optimal configuration, the energy saving need when the nodes have not a source of energy other than a small battery, new protocols to access the network and to convey the information across the network when its structure is not completely known or should be discovered, new paradigms for keeping the needed information security and privacy in a quite uncontrolled environment, and others.

Innovation in Manufacturing Networks A fundamental concept of the emergent business, scientific and technological paradigms ces area, innovation the ability to apply new ideas to products, processes, organizational practices and business models - is crucial for the future competitiveness of organizations in a continually increasingly globalised, knowledge-intensive marketplace. Responsiveness, agility as well as the high performance of manufacturing systems is responsible for the recent changes in addition to the call for new approaches to achieve cost-effective responsiveness at all the levels of an enterprise. Moreover, creating appropriate frameworks for exploring the most effective synergies between human potential and automated systems represents an enormous challenge in terms of processes characterization, modelling, and the development of adequate support tools. The implementation and use of Automation Systems requires an ever increasing knowledge of enabling technologies and Business Practices. Moreover, the digital and networked world will surely trigger new business practices. In this context and in order to achieve the desired effective and efficiency performance levels, it is crucial to maintain a balance between both the technical aspects and the human and social aspects when developing and applying new innovations and innovative enabling technologies. BASYS conferences have been developed and organized so as to promote the development of balanced automation systems in an attempt to address the majority of the current open issues.

“Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better.” advised Albert Einstein. In recent years, the research communities in Computer Science, Engineering, and other disciplines have taken this message to heart, and a relatively new field of “biologically-inspired computing” has been born. Inspiration is being drawn from nature, from the behaviors of colonies of ants, of swarms of bees and even the human body. This new paradigm in computing takes many simple autonomous objects or agents and lets them jointly perform a complex task, without having the need for centralized control. In this paradigm, these simple objects interact locally with their environment using simple rules. Applications include optimization algorithms, communications networks, scheduling and decision making, supply-chain management, and robotics, to name just a few. There are many disciplines involved in making such systems work: from artificial intelligence to energy aware systems. Often these disciplines have their own field of focus, have their own conferences, or only deal with specialized s- problems (e.g. swarm intelligence, biologically inspired computation, sensor networks). The Second IFIP Conference on Biologically-Inspired Collaborative Computing aims to bridge this separation of the scientific community and bring together researchers in the fields of Organic Computing, Autonomic Computing, Self-Organizing Systems, Pervasive Computing and related areas. We are very pleased to have two very important keynote presentations: Swarm Robotics: The Coordination of Robots via Swarm Intelligence Principles by Marco Dorigo (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium), of which an abstract is included in this volume.

These proceedings derive from an international conference on the history of computing and education. This conference is the third of hopefully a series of conferences that will take place within the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and hence, we describe it as the “Third IFIP Conference on the History of Computing and Education” or simply “History of Computing and Education 3” (HCE3). This volume consists of a collection of articles presented at the HCE3 conference held in association with the IFIP 2008 World Computer Congress in Milano, Italy. Articles range from a wide variety of computing perspectives and they represent activities from six continents. The HCE3 conference is an event of the IFIP Working Group 9.7 on the History of Computing, a working group of IFIP’ s Technical Committee 9 (TC9) on the Relationship between Computers and Society. In addition, it is in cooperation with the IFIP Technical Committee 3 (TC3) on Education. The HCE3 conference brings to light a broad spectrum of issues. It illustrates topics in computing as they occurred in the “early days” of computing whose ramifications or overtones remain with us today. Indeed, many of the early challenges remain part of our educational tapestry; most likely, many will evolve into future challenges. Therefore, these proceedings provide additional value to the reader as it will reflect in part the future development of computing and education to stimulate new ideas and models in educational development.

International Federation for Information Processing The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication. The scope of the series includes: foundations of computer science; software theory and practice; education; computer applications in technology; communication systems; systems modeling and optimization; information systems; computers and society; computer systems technology; security and protection in information processing systems; artificial intelligence; and human-computer interaction. Proceedings and post-proceedings of refereed international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing. For more information about the 300 other books in the IFIP series, please visit www.springer.com. For more information about IFIP, please visit www.ifip.org.

This year, the IFIP Working Conference on Distributed and Parallel Embedded Sys tems (DIPES 2008) is held as part of the IFIP World Computer Congress, held in Milan on September 7 10, 2008. The embedded systems world has a great deal of experience with parallel and distributed computing. Many embedded computing systems require the high performance that can be delivered by parallel computing. Parallel and distributed computing are often the only ways to deliver adequate real time performance at low power levels. This year’s conference attracted 30 submissions, of which 21 were accepted. Prof. Jor ¨ g Henkel of the University of Karlsruhe graciously contributed a keynote address on embedded computing and reliability. We would like to thank all of the program committee members for their diligence. Wayne Wolf, Bernd Kleinjohann, and Lisa Kleinjohann Acknowledgements We would like to thank all people involved in the organization of the IFIP World Computer Congress 2008, especially the IPC Co Chairs Judith Bishop and Ivo De Lotto, the Organization Chair Giulio Occhini, as well as the Publications Chair John Impagliazzo. Further thanks go to the authors for their valuable contributions to DIPES 2008. Last but not least we would like to acknowledge the considerable amount of work and enthusiasm spent by our colleague Claudius Stern in preparing theproceedingsofDIPES2008. Hemadeitpossibletoproducethemintheircurrent professional and homogeneous style.

The IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC) is one of the most important conferences in the area of computer science and a number of related Human and Social Science disciplines at the worldwide level and it has a federated structure, which takes into account the rapidly growing and expanding interests in this area. Human-Computer Interaction is now a mature and still dynamically evolving part of this area, which is represented in IFIP by the Technical Committee 13 on HCI. We are convinced that in this edition of WCC, which takes place for the first time in Italy, it will be interesting and useful to have a Symposium on Human- Computer Interaction in order to present and discuss a number of contributions in this field. There has been increasing awareness among designers of interactive systems of the importance of designing for usability, but we are still far from having products that are really usable, and usability can mean different things depending on the application domain. We are all aware that too many users of current technology feel often frustrated because computer systems are not compatible with their abilities and needs with existing work practices. As designers of tomorrow technology, we have the responsibility of creating computer artefacts that would permit better user experience with the various computing devices, so that users may enjoy more satisfying experiences with information and communications technologies.

International Federation for Information Processing The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication. The scope of the series includes: foundations of computer science; software theory and practice; education; computer applications in technology; communication systems; systems modeling and optimization; information systems; computers and society; computer systems technology; security and protection in information processing systems; artificial intelligence; and human-computer interaction. Proceedings and post-proceedings of refereed international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing. For more information about the 300 other books in the IFIP series, please visit www.springer.com. For more information about IFIP, please visit www.ifip.org.

Introduction The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) is a non-profit umbrella organization for national societies working in the field of information processing. It was founded in 1960 under the auspices of UNESCO. It is organized into several technical c- mittees. This book represents the proceedings of the 2008 conference of technical committee 8 (TC8), which covers the field of infor- tion systems. TC8 aims to promote and encourage the advancement of research and practice of concepts, methods, techniques and issues related to information systems in organisations. TC8 has established eight working groups covering the following areas: design and evaluation of information systems; the interaction of information systems and the organization; decision support systems; e-business information systems: multi-disciplinary research and practice; inf- mation systems in public administration; smart cards, technology, applications and methods; and enterprise information systems. Further details of the technical committee and its working groups can be found on our website (ifiptc8. dsi. uminho. pt). This conference was part of IFIP’s World Computer Congress in Milan, Italy which took place 7-10 September 2008. The occasion celebrated the 32nd anniversary of IFIP TC8. The call for papers invited researchers, educators, and practitioners to submit papers and panel proposals that advance concepts, methods, techniques, tools, issues, education, and practice of information systems in organi- tions. Thirty one submissions were received.

We are very pleased to introduce Open Source Development, Communities and Quality. The International Conference on Open Source Systems has come to its fourth edition – OSS 2008. Now, Free, Libre, and Open Source software is by all means now one of the most relevant subjects of study in several disciplines, ranging from information technology to social sciences and including also law, business, and political sciences. There are several conference tracks devoted to open source software with several publications appearing in high quality journals and magazines. OSS 2008 has been organized with the purpose of being the reference venue for those working in this area, being the most prominent conference in this area. For this th reason OSS 2008 has been located within the frameworks of the 20 World Computer Congress, WCC 2008, in Milan, the largest event of IFIP in 2008. We believe that this conference series, and the IFIP working group it represents, can play an important role in meeting these challenges, and hope that this book will become a valuable contribution to the open source body of research.

The papers in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the conference ‘ Artificial Intelligence in Theory and Practice’ (IFIP AI 2008), which formed part of the 20th World Computer Congress of IFIP, the International Federation for Information Processing (WCC-2008), in Milan, Italy in September 2008. The conference is organised by the IFIP Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence (Technical Committee 12) and its Working Group 12.5 (Artificial Intelligence Applications). All papers were reviewed by at least two members of our Program Committee. Final decisions were made by the Executive Program Committee, which comprised John Debenham (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia), Ilias Maglogiannis (University of Aegean, Samos, Greece), Eunika Mercier-Laurent (KIM, France) and myself. The best papers were selected for the conference, either as long papers (maximum 10 pages) or as short papers (maximum 5 pages) and are included in this volume. The international nature of IFIP is amply reflected in the large number of countries represented here. The conference also featured invited talks by Prof. Nikola Kasabov (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand) and Prof. Lorenza Saitta (University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy). I should like to thank the conference chair, John Debenham for all his efforts and the members of our program committee for reviewing papers to a very tight deadline.

Computer-Aided Innovation (CAI) is emerging as a strategic domain of research and application to support enterprises throughout the overall innovation process. The 5.4 Working Group of IFIP aims at defining the scientific foundation of Computer Aided Innovation systems and at identifying state of the art and trends of CAI tools and methods. These Proceedings derive from the second Topical Session on Computer- Aided Innovation organized within the 20th World Computer Congress of IFIP. The goal of the Topical Session is to provide a survey of existing technologies and research activities in the field and to identify opportunities of integration of CAI with other PLM systems. According to the heterogeneous needs of innovation-related activities, the papers published in this volume are characterized by multidisciplinary contents and complementary perspectives and scopes. Such a richness of topics and disciplines will certainly contribute to the promotion of fruitful new collaborations and synergies within the IFIP community. Gaetano Cascini th Florence, April 30 20 08 CAI Topical Session Organization The IFIP Topical Session on Computer-Aided Innovation (CAI) is a co-located conference organized under the auspices of the IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC) 2008 in Milano, Italy Gaetano Cascini CAI Program Committee Chair gaetano.cascini@unifi.it

These proceedings contain the papers selected for presentation at the 23rd Inter- tional Information Security Conference (SEC 2008), co-located with IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC 2008), September 8–10, 2008 in Milan, Italy. In - sponse to the call for papers, 143 papers were submitted to the conference. All - pers were evaluated on the basis of their signi?cance, novelty,and technical quality, and reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Reviewing was blind meaning that the authors were not told which committee members reviewed which papers. The program committee meeting was held electronically, holding - tensive discussion over a period of three weeks. Of the papers submitted, 42 full papers and 11 short papers were selected for presentation at the conference. A conference like this just does not happen; it depends on the volunteer efforts of a host of individuals. There is a long list of people who volunteered their time and energy to put together the conference and who deserve acknowledgment. We thank all members of the program committee and the external reviewers for their hard work in the paper evaluation. Due to the large number of submissions, p- gram committee members were required to complete their reviews in a short time frame. We are especially thankful to them for the commitment they showed with their active participation in the electronic discussion.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 1st IFIP Entertainment Computing Symposium held in Milan, Italy on September 7-10, 2008.The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication. The scope of the series includes: foundations of computer science; software theory and practice; education; computer applications in technology; communication systems; systems modeling and optimization; information systems; computers and society; computer systems technology; security and protection in information processing systems; artificial intelligence; and human-computer interaction. Proceedings and post-proceedings of refereed international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of Industry Oriented Conferences held at IFIP 20th World Computer Congress in September 2008.The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication. The scope of the series includes: foundations of computer science; software theory and practice; education; computer applications in technology; communication systems; systems modeling and optimization; information systems; computers and society; computer systems technology; security and protection in information processing systems; artificial intelligence; and human-computer interaction. Proceedings and post-proceedings of refereed international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing.

ED-L2L, Learning to Live in the Knowledge Society, is one of the co-located conferences of the 20th World Computer Congress (WCC2008). The event is organized under the auspices of IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) and is to be held in Milan from 7th to 10th September 2008. ED-L2L is devoted to themes related to ICT for education in the knowledge society. It provides an international forum for professionals from all continents to discuss research and practice in ICT and education. The event brings together educators, researchers, policy makers, curriculum designers, teacher educators, members of academia, teachers and content producers. ED-L2L is organised by the IFIP Technical Committee 3, Education, with the support of the Institute for Educational Technology, part of the National Research Council of Italy. The Institute is devoted to the study of educational innovation brought about through the use of ICT. Submissions to ED-L2L are published in this conference book. The published papers are devoted to the published conference themes: Developing digital literacy for the knowledge society: information problem solving, creating, capturing and transferring knowledge, commitment to lifelong learning Teaching and learning in the knowledge society, playful and fun learning at home and in the school New models, processes and systems for formal and informal learning environments and organisations Developing a collective intelligence, learning together and sharing knowledge ICT issues in education - ethics, equality, inclusion and parental role Educating ICT professionals for the global knowledge society Managing the transition to the knowledge society

This book represents the compilation of papers presented at the IFIP Working Group 8. 2 conference entitled “Information Technology in the Service Economy: Challenges st and Possibilities for the 21 Century. ” The conference took place at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, on August 10 13, 2008. Par ticipation in the conference spanned the continents from Asia to Europe with paper submissions global in focus as well. Conference submissions included complete d research papers and research in progress reports. Papers submitted to the conference went through a double blind review process in which the program co chairs, an associate editor, and reviewers provided assessments and recommendations. The editor ial efforts of the associate editors and reviewers in this process were outstanding. To foster high quality research publications in this field of study, authors of accepted pape rs were then invited to revise and resubmit their work. Through this rigorous review and revision process, 12 completed research papers and 11 research in progress reports were accepted for presentation and publica tion. Paper workshop sessions were also esta blished to provide authors of emergent work an opportunity to receive feedback fromthe IF IP 8. 2 community. Abstracts of these new projects are included in this volume. Four panels were presented at the conference to provide discussion forums for the varied aspect s of IT, service, and globalization. Panel abstracts are also included here.

Industries and particularly the manufacturing sector have been facing difficult challenges in a context of socio-economic turbulence characterized by complexity as well as the speed of change in causal interconnections in the socio-economic environment. In order to respond to these challenges companies are forced to seek new technological and organizational solutions. In this context two main characteristics emerge as key properties of a modern automation system – agility and distribution. Agility because systems need not only to be flexible in order to adjust to a number of a-priori defined scenarios, but rather must cope with unpredictability. Distribution in the sense that automation and business processes are becoming distributed and supported by collaborative networks. Emerging Solutions for Future Manufacturing Systems includes the papers selected for the BASYS’04 conference, which was held in Vienna, Austria in September 2004 and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).

Mobility is perhaps the most important market and technological trend within information and communication technology. With the advent of new mobile infrastructures providing higher bandwidth and constant connection to the network from virtually everywhere, the way people use information resources is predicted to be radically transformed. Over the last years, a new breed of information systems, referred to as mCommerce systems or mobile information systems, has appeared to address this emerging situation. In 2000, the IFIP 8.1 WG decided to look into establishing a task group to look closer at this area, and the idea was adopted and extended by IFIP TC8 the following year. After the arrangement of several workshop, this task group has been the driving force behind the arrangement of MOBIS (IFIP TC 8 Working Conference on Mobile Information systems) held in Oslo, Norway, 15-17 September 2004. The objective of the working conference was to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners interested in planning, analysis, design, construction, modification, implementation, utilization, evaluation, and management of mobile information systems to meet, and exchange research ideas and results. Specifically, we tried to use the working conference to • Clarify differences and similarities between the development of mobile vs. more traditional information systems • Investigate organizational impact of mobile information systems • Investigate mobile commerce applications combined with the advantages of mobile communications technologies X Mobile Information Systems • Evaluate existing and newly developed approaches for analysis, design, implementation, and evolution of mobile information systems.

In recent years the situation of production enterprises has been aggravated by the change from a vendors' market to a buyers' market, the globaHsation of competition, a severe market segmentation and rapid progress in product and process technologies. Beside cost and quality, time has taken on an increasingly important role, forcing enterprises to become ever more dynamic and versatile. Therefore, in all areas of production management, novel, effective concepts, procedures and tools have been developed in order to meet these new requirements. But beyond these more technical, organisational and information technology related aspects there is certainly another one which has to be considered more closely than ever before, namely that of human resources. Is not group technology also related to group work? Do partners in a global network only operate according to predefined process schemes with no personal contact? Are the mental process models of the programmers of ERP-systems the same as those of the users? What is the impact of human behaviour and what consequences are to be expected if organisational and individual objectives are separated? And finally, how do necessary technological changes affect the workforce and the individual needs and wishes of the employees.

This book draws together papers presented at the IFIP/IEEE Sixth Conference on Mobile and Wireless Communications. It focuses on the convergence of mobile wireless networks and the Internet, in particular, integrating stand-alone mobile networks with infrastructure wireless networks to create more robust and accommodating wireless networks.

Data Mining is the process of posing queries and extracting useful information, patterns and trends previously unknown from large quantities of data [Thu, 00]. It is the process where intelligent tools are applied in order to extract data patterns [JM, 01]. This encompasses a number of different technical approaches, such as cluster analysis, learning classification and association rules, and finding dependencies. Agents are defined as software entities that perform some set of tasks on behalf of users with some degree of autonomy. This research work deals about developing a automated data mining system which encompasses the familiar data mining algorithms using intelligent agents in object oriented databases and proposing a framework. Because the data mining system uses the intelligent agents, a new user will be able to interact with the data mining system without much data mining technical knowledge. This system will automatically select the appropriate data mining technique and select the necessary field needed from the database at the appropriate time without expecting the users to specify the specific technique and the parameters. Also a new framework is proposed for incorporating intelligent agents with automated data mining. One of the major goals in developing this system is to give the control to the computer for learning automatically by using intelligent agents.

There has continuously been a massive growth of Internet traffic for these years despite the "bubble burst" in year 2000. As the telecom market is gradually picking up, it would be a consensus in telecom and data-com industries that the CAPEX (Capital Expenditures) to rebuild the network infrastructure to cope with this traffic growth would be imminent, while the OPEX (Operational Expenditures) has to be within a tight constraint. Therefore, the newly built 2r^-century network has to fully evolve from voice-oriented legacy networks, not only by increasing the transmission capacity of WDM links but also by introducing switching technologies in optical domain to provide full-connectivity to support a wide variety of services. This book stems from the technical contributions presented at the Optical Networks and Technology Conference (OpNeTec), inaugurated this year 2004 in Pisa, Italy, and collects innovations of optical network technologies toward the 2V^ century network. High-quality recent research results on optical networks and related technologies are presented, including IP over WDM integration, burst and packet switchings, control and managements, operation, metro- and access networks, and components and devices in the perspective of network application. An effort has been made throughout the conference, hopefully reflected at least partially in this book, to bring together researchers, scientists, and engineers working both academia and industries to discuss the relative impact of networks on technologies and vice versa, with a vision of the future.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Network Control and Engineering for Quality of Service, Security and Mobility (Net-Con'2004), celebrated in Palma de Mallorca (Illes Balears, Spain) during November 2-5, 2004. This IFIP TC6 Conference was organized by the Universitat de les Illes Balears and sponsored by the following Working Groups: WG6.2 (Network and Internetwork Architectures), WG6.6 (Management of Networks and Distributed Systems), WG6.7 (Smart Networks) and WG6.8 (Mobile and Wireless Communications). The rapid evolution of the networking industry introduces new exciting challenges that need to be explored by the research community. The adoption of Internet as the global network infrastructure places the issue of quality of service among one of the hot topics nowadays: a huge diversity of applications with quite different service requirements must be supported over a basic core of protocols. Also, the open and uncontrolled nature of Internet enforces the need to guarantee secure transactions among users, thus placing security as another hot topic. Finally, the explosion of mobility and its integration as part of the global infrastructure are probably now the most challenging issues in the networking field.

Since the first DIISM conference, which took place 9 years ago, the world has seen drastic changes, including the transformation of manufacturing and engineering software, and the information and communication technologies deployed. The conditions for manufacturing and engineering have changed on a large scale, in terms of technology-enabled collaboration among the fields of design, engineering, production, usage, maintenance and recyclingldisposal. These changes can be observed in rapidly-growing fields such as supply chain management. As for production technologies at factory floors, new visions on human-machine co-existing systems involve both knowledge management and multi-media technologies. Therefore, because of these changes, the importance of information infrastructure for manufacturing has increased, stunningly. Information infrastructure plays a key role in integrating diverse fields of manufacturing, engineering and management. This, in addition to its basic role, as the information and communication platform for the production systems. Eventually, it should also serve the synthetic function of knowledge management, during the life cycles of both the production systems and their products, and for all stakeholders.

Broadband Satellite Communication Systems and the Challenges of Mobility is an essential reference for both academic and professional researchers in the field of telecommunications, computer networking and wireless networks.Recently the request of multimedia services has been rapidly increasing and satellite networks appear to be attractive for a fast service deployment and for extending the typical service area of terrestrial systems.  In comparison with traditional wide area networks, a characteristic of satellite communication systems is their ability in broadcasting and multicasting multimedia information flows anywhere over the satellite coverage.  The papers presented in this volume highlight key areas such as Satellite Network Architectures, Services and Applications; Mobile Satellite Systems and Services; and Hybrid Satellite and Terrestrial Networks.Mobility will inevitably be one of the main characteristics of future networks, terminals and applications and, thus, extending and integrating fixed network protocols and services to mobile systems represents one of the main issues of present networking.  The secondary focus of this volume is on challenges of mobility, that is, on technologies, protocols and services for the support of seamless and nomadic user access to new classes of applications in person-to-person, device-to-device and device-to-person environments.  The book comprises recent results of research and development in the following areas; Seamless mobility; Mobile ad hoc and sensor networks; Analysis, simulation and measurements of mobile and wireless systems;  Integration and inter-working of wired and wireless networks; QoS in mobile and wireless networks; Future trends and issues concerning mobility.This state -of-the-art volume contains a collection of papers from two of the workshops of the 18th IFIP World Computer Congress, held August 22-27, 2004, in Toulouse, France: the Workshop on Broadband Satellite Communication Systems, and the Workshop on the Challenges of Mobility.

Information Technology and Educational Management in the Knowledge Society is an essential reference for both academic and professional researchers in the field of information technology and educational management. Since the mid-1980's, computer assisted educational information systems have been developing in various parts of the world and the knowledge surrounding the development and implementation of these systems has been growing. The papers presented in this volume are the result of an international call for papers addressing the challenges faced by the information technology and education management (ITEM) field in a society where knowledge management is becoming a major issue both in educational and business systems.This state-of-the-art volume presents the proceedings of the 6th International Working Conference on Information Technology in Educational Management, held July 2004 in Spain. The collection will be important not only for information technology and education management experts and researchers, but also for all teachers and administrators interested in this growing field.